“I-yes. Spectacular.”
“There are lots of those around. No big deal. Some semiprecious stones are a big deal, because their value is determined not just by quality, but by rarity. Certain kinds of garnets have more value than the precious stones they resemble. Such as this tsavorite-almost impossible to tell from an emerald, yes?”
She glanced at the incredible stone, and then at Mitch. “Beautiful,” she murmured, but it wasn’t strictly the stone she had in mind. A lock of dark hair had fallen over his forehead; she longed to brush it back. At the throat of his open flannel shirt, she could see the crisp spray of dark hair and could remember the feel of that hair against her bare skin. He was so very much a man.
The banked fires in his eyes were fooling her not at all, but it was more than sexual feeling that stirred her. It was an aching awareness of the man who was learning to share his feelings, who had so very much emotion inside him. An ache for his past loneliness…a loneliness that had lasted for way too many years.
“This one-” Mitch gently scooped a stone from her navel with a wicked grin “-is the most valuable. A demantoid garnet. Not found, regrettably, in Idaho-not yet, anyway. Geologically, there’s no specific reason why some couldn’t be discovered here, but for the moment that’s talking pipe dreams.”
Her fingers softly curled around his wrist. “As much as you loved it, you couldn’t skate, Mitch?” she whispered softly. “Even sometimes?”
If he hadn’t pressed a finger on her lips, she might have believed he hadn’t heard her. “We’re getting to the important part of the lecture,” he told her. “Star garnets. The Star of Idaho-” He raised another stone for her to see. “When the light is just right behind it, there seems to be a six-rayed star inside it. Actually, the star effect is a flaw in the stone-rutile…” There was no waiting, not any longer. “This last stone,” he said quietly, “is mine.”
Mitch’s eyes held hers, the faintest hint of a lazy smile on his mouth as his fingers carefully stroked the intimate triangle between her thighs. It was no accident that a certain gem had spilled there. Kay’s breath caught. “Yours,” she echoed.
“Totally.” He leaned over and roughly brushed his lips on hers. “Totally, Kay. No one else will ever know her.”
“Mitch-”
The strangest emotion clawed at her soul, even as he was pressing the stone into her palm. “No one’s ever seen it before, Kay. It’s just been registered, a week ago. A new stone’s still discovered from time to time, even now-but not often. An eight-sided garnet-it’s been months since I mined the first group of them and had them studied and evaluated, but I knew. I knew the first time I laid eyes on her…”
She sat up, reluctantly dragging her eyes from Mitch’s face to look at his stone. Moving it carefully back and forth between her fingertips, she was captivated by the play of flickering sparks within. The star was like a secret, only revealed when one moved the stone with precious care, and then the silver darts played up against the dark ruby background, infinitely fragile yet as brilliant as sunlight. When deprived of light, the star was lost.
“When you register a new stone, you have to name it.” Mitch pushed the garnets gently off her, urging her back against the pillows. “Kaystar,” he murmured. “Do you like it? Sort of like Telstar. Open, love.”
Her lips obediently parted, welcoming the possession of his as a rush of jumbled feelings exploded in her head. His mouth molded over hers and his palm slid down her fire-warmed skin and the room tilted. She closed her eyes, savoring the gift he had offered her. “Mitch,” she whispered when his mouth lifted from hers to skim kisses down the side of her throat.
“Don’t tell me the name is corny. I’ve been afraid you would think that. I’m not a sentimental man, Kay, but there was no possible way I could name it anything else.”
“It’s beautiful, Mitch.” Softly, her fingers stroked his cheek, loving the fierce vulnerability in his eyes. “More than beautiful.” Her other hand moved to undo the buttons on his shirt, one by one. Finally, there was room for her palm to sneak inside, to stroke his warm flesh, to feel the beat of life beneath her fingertips. Unconsciously, her finger traced the smooth line of his scar.
He bent to kiss her again, but his hand closed over that single roaming finger of hers. “You still want to know, don’t you?” he said quietly. “It’s bothered you ever since we went skating.”
“Not to pry,” she whispered. “Just to share, Mitch. I want to share everything I can with you.”
Straightening up, he drew off his shirt, and then came down to her once more. His head bent as he slowly traced a finger around one breast, raising gooseflesh, but he didn’t stop. “It wasn’t,” he said roughly, “like being an invalid. No, there was no skating, but I was hardly bedridden, either. I could swim. Some. I could learn, I could study, I could talk to people. I wasn’t some inanimate…parasite.”
“Mitch,” Kay whispered.
“What?”
“Get that tone out of your voice,” she said softly.
“What tone?”
“The anger. Who exactly are you angry at, anyway?”
Mitch hesitated, and then half smiled, his fingers reaching up to sift through her hair. “Myself. For all those years I couldn’t do the things I expected of myself as a man.”
“Mitch, that’s so damned stupid.” She sat up, her hair shimmering behind her to catch the firelight. Her voice was a fierce, low cry, muffled as she pressed her lips to his chest, her arms wrapping tightly around him. She felt the kiss on the crown of her head, and then another. “Why three?”
“Three?”
“You said there were three operations…”
“Because a body,” he growled, “sometimes rejects the new valve. They put you on an operating table and they open you up, and then they decide what kind of valve they’re going to put in. A goat valve? A pig valve? Maybe a plastic one. There’s a choice of better than two dozen. They tried two and my body didn’t like either one. Now what do you want to know?”
He was so defensive suddenly, yet his lips scored kisses down her throat, into the hollow, tracing the line of her collarbone. When his tongue flicked out to taste that same warm skin, she caught her breath and struggled for control. It mattered that he finish it. For his sake, not for hers. “And the third time?” she whispered.
He sighed, raising his eyes directly to hers. “The surgeons didn’t want to perform the third operation,” he said flatly. “Six or seven hours under the knife is stress enough, they told me, but when the body rejects a new valve, suddenly the heart is under a lot more stress, and it becomes a matter of life or death. So I had two choices-no more operations and living the rest of my life as a sedentary recluse, or gambling on surgery one more time. Honey, don’t. I knew damn well you wouldn’t be satisfied until you’d heard the whole story, or I wouldn’t have told you…Kay.”
Her whole body was trembling. He’d almost died? He’d made a choice in which his life was at risk. She wound her arms around him, bit her lip and forced back tears.
“It’s over,” he said roughly. “Forget it, Kay. You wanted to know. Now you know. We’ll never talk of it again.” His face was grave, hovering over hers, worldly and old and fiercely possessive as he stroked her hair and took her lips again and again, willing a different kind of trembling to overtake her body.
The soft blanket crushed against her bare skin. Fire licked and spit in the hearth, and shadows climbed up the walls. Their breathing became increasingly labored. Once, Kay felt a cool, smooth gem beneath her and Mitch’s hand swept it away as if it were a bothersome pebble, almost making her smile. His precious stones were suddenly not so precious. There was clearly only one thing on his mind.